McGinnis: Did ‘Glee’ steal from a cult-favorite musician?

It’s a wonderful comedic premise. Take Sir Mix-a-Lot’s kitschy rap classic “Baby Got Back” and turn it into a soft rock ballad. It was wonderful when comic musician Jonathan Coulton first recorded his version of “Baby Got Back” in 2005. It helped establish his cult following, which exploded after he contributed the song “Still Alive” to the classic video game “Portal.”

And it was still a wonderful comic premise when word hit the internet that FOX’s “Glee” would feature a cover of “Baby Got Back” in the episode “Sadie Hawkins.” A soft rock cover. Wait a minute …

Now, if it were simply a matter of two individual entities having the same great idea, that would be one thing. It’s plausible that no one associated with “Glee” has ever heard of Coulton or his version. So if they independently wrote a comically “soft” version of Mix-a-Lot’s song, that wouldn’t automatically scream “rip-off.”

Then an apparently official cut of the “Glee” version of “Baby” popped up on the Internet. And it became clear that the two versions share much more than a common inspiration. The two cuts are virtually identical.

From the opening chorus to the backing tracks to the beat to the … everything, this supposedly official “Glee” cut is essentially the exact same song as Coulton’s version. Canny Internet users showed via mashup websites that when played simultaneously, the two versions are pretty much indistinguishable. There’s even some debate over whether “Glee” sampled Coulton’s music track directly for its version.

Then there’s the matter of “Johnny C.” While the lion’s share of Mix-a-Lot’s lyrics were left intact in Coulton’s original cover, he did change one moment where the rapper referred to himself by name. Coulton altered the phrase to “Johnny C,” a reference to himself, of course. In the unearthed “Glee” version, the singer gets to that same lyric and refers to himself as … “Johnny C.” A remarkable coincidence, no?

Of course, if “Glee” was using Coulton’s work with his permission, that’d be one thing. But we have word from the man himself that this is not the case. Coulton has made plain in numerous postings on Twitter and his own blog that no one from the show had ever contacted him to request permission before the episode’s production — he found out when the track hit the net, just like everyone else.

Still, Coulton asked his fans to exercise caution in their outrage. “This is the Internet after all — it’s a complicated place and it gets a lot of things wrong,” he wrote on his blog. Maybe the leaked track wasn’t official. Maybe there was just a miscommunication. Maybe …

Then, on Jan. 24, two things happened. One, the “Sadie Hawkins” episode of “Glee” aired, featuring the exact same version of “Baby Got Back” as was leaked. No credit to Coulton was given. The track is on sale on iTunes.

Then, on his blog, Coulton noted that “They also got in touch with my peeps to basically say that they’re within their legal rights to do this, and that I should be happy for the exposure (even though they do not credit me, and have not even publicly acknowledged that it’s my version — so you know, it’s kind of SECRET

exposure).”

Apparently, the legalities surrounding re-recording a cover are murky enough that, even if a new version is demonstrably different from the original, FOX believes it’s on strong legal ground to simply copy the work outright without credit. And previous situations where cover artists claimed to have been “given greater exposure” by having work copied without credit on “Glee” have borne this out.

But let’s leave legalities aside, here. As someone who appreciates art, this is simply wrong. It is disgusting for employees of a major company to borrow another’s work, not give said artist credit and then tell him he should be grateful for the attention. FOX may be legally in the right. But morally, it’s utterly bankrupt.

Coulton, however, has responded with class and brilliance. He has posted a new track himself on iTunes, GooglePlay and Amazon — “Baby Got Back (in the style of ‘Glee’)”. Yes, that’s right, he’s released a cover of the “Glee” cover of his cover — which, illustrating his point, sounds exactly like the original. Oh, and all proceeds will go to the VH1 Save the Music Foundation and the It Gets Better Project.

And as far as FOX’s arrogant assertion about “exposure” — well, let’s prove it right. Look up Coulton on iTunes and through his official website at JonathanCoulton.com. Listen to his amazing work and support him. And let’s give “Glee” the opposite of exposure — if the show and its network feel so cavalier about borrowing from others to prop up their enterprise, “Glee” clearly does not deserve any more attention than necessary.

McGinnis: Jonathan Coulton finds laughs in unique subjects

Most musicians have moments where their audience will sing along with them. But comic musician Jonathan Coulton may be the only one who has to give the crowd pointers on how to properly behave like zombies while they do so.

“That’s awesome, that sounds great,” he told a crowd at the Penny Arcade Expo. “In fact, it sounds a little too good. It doesn’t really sound like zombies. If you really were a bunch of zombies…”

Just par for the course for the 39-year-old singer and songwriter. Coulton — JoCo to his many fans — thrives on composing and performing pieces that are wonderfully unconventional, no matter the subject matter. He’ll write one song finding something odd in a normal situation, and another finding something normal in an odd one. And they are all written with sophistication and intelligence.

“It needs to be good. It needs to be really tight, lyrically and musically. If there’s a tiny piece of it that you just treat as a throwaway line, then you have failed to finish making it, I think. It’s not going to be good,” Coulton said in an interview. “Comedy music is constructed, and it needs to be a solid construction or it’s not going to work.”

Coulton

For Coulton, the experience needed to make that construction was learned over many years. He had been involved in music from childhood, and studied it at Yale in pursuit of a Bachelor of Arts degree. It was there he met longtime friend John Hodgman, best known from his work on “The Daily Show” and as the PC in the Mac commercials. Hodgman would play a big role in Coulton’s evolution as a musician.

“He essentially quit his day job as a literary agent to become a writer, and he started doing freelance writing for magazines,” Coulton said. “And it was just very audacious and bold, maybe even seemed foolish before it already happened. And then to watch him build that into exactly the career he wanted was really very inspiring.”

Coulton had already released a 2003 album, to limited success, when he quit his own job as a computer programmer in September 2005 to pursue his music full-time. He soon launched a project called Thing a Week — vowing to release one new song every week for a year.

“It was a trial by fire. Which is exactly what I had intended it to be. Part of the spirit behind it was, ‘Okay, sucker, you want this to be your job? Guess what? Get to work!’ And I think without that, I could have easily flitted away six months or a year without really doing anything. The real trick of it, when you’re trying to be a real creative person, is that you need to create things. And it’s very easy to get distracted by all the other things you need to do.

“It was excruciating in many ways, because it was relentless. I was so tired of writing songs by the end of the year. But so much great stuff came out of it — not just in terms of the songs that I was able to write that I would not have chosen to write otherwise, but also growth in terms of my own talents and confidence, that I could do this.”

From that year’s burst of creativity, many songs which helped establish Coulton with online fans came forth: A hilarious cover of “Baby Got Back,” the semi-autobiographical “Code Monkey,” zombie anthem “Re: Your Brains” and more. But perhaps the biggest milestone came in 2007, when he recorded “Still Alive,” the ending theme to the smash hit video game “Portal.”

“I don’t think any of us had any idea how big that was going to be. That really amped things up and exposed me to a wider audience — still of the same general neighborhood, gamers, but now worldwide. I mean, that game was huge,” Coulton said.

Coulton confirmed that he will be involved with the eagerly awaited “Portal 2.” “I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be yet. Sometime soon I will actually play through an early version of the game, and I’ll have some discussions with the writers about the plot. Yeah, I will be writing some music for that game.”

Revisiting “Portal” is just one of many events on the horizon for Coulton. Between his regular touring schedule, the upcoming “JoCo Cruise Crazy” Caribbean cruise featuring music and performances from a number of comic luminaries, and a new album produced by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, Coulton’s musical career continues to flourish.

With milestones like these, more and more people are getting to know who Coulton is. But he insists that breaking into the “mainstream” is never the real goal.

“The point of me doing this of this is to make a living creating the music I want to create,” Coulton said.

“Blue Sunny Day” This up-tempo ditty sounds like it would fit right in on a Beach Boys album, but its subject — a depressed vampire who longs to see daylight — probably wouldn’t.

“I was actually trying to write a happy song about a sunny day. That was my challenge. I had this music and I had the line, ‘blue sunny day’ somewhere. And then I realized that the word ‘blue’ has two meanings. And maybe, it was somebody who was sad about a sunny day. And then I realized, the person who would be saddest about a sunny day is probably a vampire. And once I had that, I couldn’t escape its gravity.”

“Creepy Doll” Almost a musical “Twilight Zone” episode, this scary song deals with a children’s doll that slowly drives its owner mad.

“I remember the moment. I was sitting on my couch, on a Tuesday or Wednesday, trying to think of song ideas for that week’s Thing on Friday. And across the room from me was my daughter’s doll, sitting in a very bizarre, slumped over position. And it all sort of came to me at once.”

“I Crush Everything” What’s more terrifying than a giant undersea monster? Maybe nothing — especially if you’re the monster itself. Coulton said this sad song about a self-loathing giant squid is one of his favorites.

“I was performing at a conference called PopTech in Maine, with a lot of thinkers and scientists and people speaking about really interesting things. One of them was an inventor, and he’d created these submersible vehicles that were really cool. And he was talking about giant squids and he was saying that it was no wonder that we’ve never seen one — at that time we hadn’t — alive, because when we go looking for them, we have these giant machines with these bright lights. And for all we know, the giant squid is a terribly shy creature. And I thought that was really interesting, to have a giant sea monster who was afraid of things, and was actually a very delicate creature.”

“Re: Your Brains” Imagine the annoying guy down the hall at work who can’t understand why everything isn’t done his way. Now imagine that guy as a zombie. One of Coulton’s most popular songs.

“It was a good example of a song that came nearly fully formed to me from the kernel of an idea. I don’t know where it came from, but I was thinking about a zombie who was trying to speak in a very rational way about his condition, his predicament. And the line that came to me first was, he’s explaining that all he wants to do is eat your brains. And he doesn’t think it’s unreasonable. That idea was sort of the foundation of that song, and once I had that, it sort of wrote itself.”